I have a friend who recently returned from Venezuela, and he said much of the upper-middle class there talks about Hugo Chavez the way the upper-middle class here talks about George Bush. They're embarrassed by his bombast and bravado; they're bewildered by his unflinching, party-line on-messageness; and they believe his policies to be economically harmful to the people that make up the vast majority of his base.

When Hugo Chavez threw his support behind Ollanta Humala in the Peruvian presidential election, he did so with an eye toward his dreams of building a strong Leftist regional alliance throughout South America. Alan Garcia's win in Sunday's presidential run-off appears to many to have put that dream to an end. However, the writing has long been on the wall, and in electing Alan Garcia, voters in South America have done something more than simply choose the lesser of two evils.

*

Let's start with a quick recap: Peru needed a runoff because on April 9th no single candidate in their presidential election managed to land more than 50% of the vote. From an original pool of more than 20 candidates, the electorate whittled its way down to two: Ollanta Humala, the retired army man and ardent leftist, and Alan Garcia, former Peruvian president who led the country to economic ruin and food shortages during the late 1980s. Of the big three contenders in the original election, Lordes Flores, the strongest supporter of globalist economic policies and the most "pro-business" of the candidates, did not make it into the run-off.

In our previous discussion of Peruvian electoral politics, we also talked at length about Peru's economy. That economy has grown significantly over the last several years -- at an average annual clip of close to 5% -- but that growth has been extremely concentrated. Poverty levels in the country are essentially equal to what they were when current president Alejandro Toledo took office in 2001, and in the mind of many Peruvians, all that economic growth has gone out of the country and into the pockets of multi-national mining interests. This type of economy -- one structured around the export of basic raw materials -- led us to label Peru "colonial," irrespective of whether control of that economy rested with the state or with private interests.

After his comfortable win in Sunday's run-off election, Alan Garcia has a mandate to move the country toward an economic model based on international trade (though he promises some protections, especially for farmers) and away from Chavez's strongly regionalist approach. According to many reports, Garcia's victory was the typical result of a three candidate race: if the centrist is able to survive the first round, he or she always wins the second because he gets all the votes from the side that lost. But in a country that is 80% Native American or mestizo (and one in which all eligible voters are required by law to vote in the presidential election), it seems unlikely that Garcia's win was the simple result of Flores' voters choosing the candidate who was, in their minds, the lesser of two evils. And so on some level, then, Garcia's win must truly be a mandate of sorts from a group of people who have historically been among those most consistently excluded from the world economy.

And that's no real surprise if you continue to consider the colonial history of the area. Chavez has named his movement for regional opposition to the global clout of the United States a "Bolivarian Revolution." This term means nothing to most of the people of Peru. Bolivar and his contemporaries were colonizers of the Americas, and the invocation of their names -- even for reasons of populism or redistribution of wealth -- is aggressive and consumptive.

As the Native American and mesitzo people of Peru exercise their political power, they have begun to derail the regionalist dreams of Hugo Chavez. That's deeply ironic given the fact that the pre-colonial economies of modern South America were regionally focused in the way that Chavez dreams of.

« Previous Next »